Training 'To Get It Right'

FORT STORY — Fort Eustis soldiers demonstrate how they stormed the beach in Kuwait to deliver ammunition to the front line.

When Fort Eustis-based 7th Transportation Group soldiers first deployed to the Middle East more than a year and a half ago, they knew they would play an important role in the war in Iraq.

"Our main mission over there was to get the bullets to the war fighter," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Clutter, who works in the group's 24th Transportation Battalion. "We offloaded ships coming into a Kuwaiti port and carried the ammunition to shore."

And they had to do it without a pier.

Tuesday, at a bare beach at Fort Story in Virginia Beach, the soldiers showcased just how they unloaded -- without the convenience of pulling directly up to a permanent pier attached to land -- every bullet, grenade and tank round the entire coalition force used in the first phase of the war in Iraq.

"The operation is called JLOTS," said Chief Warrant Officer Mike Wichterman, the group's operations officer. "It stands for Joint Logistics-Over-the-Shore. It's when we come in and move cargo onto a beach by augmenting a port that isn't big enough for our mission."

Augmenting a port, Wichterman said as he pointed to soldiers playing out his explanation in real life, basically means the soldiers come in and create a way to accomplish the mission.

"If a ship can't unload right at the shore," Wichterman said, "then we unload it in the water and bring it to the shore."

Soldiers place giant, floating squares connected tightly together into the water. The platform -- officially called a roll-on, roll-off discharge facility -- sits at the base of a cargo ship anchored hundreds of feet from land.

The platform gives soldiers on the cargo ship a surface to begin unloading ammunition, as the group did, from the cargo ship into the smaller ships.

The smaller ships drive closer to shore where more of the floating squares have been put together to create a temporary pier.

"Being able to do this gives us the capability to operate anywhere in the world," Wichterman said. "We can literally go anywhere and offload vehicles and cargo in support of military operations."

Command Sgt. Major Paul Nelson, the group's highest ranking enlisted soldier, said they were forced to unload ships carrying supplies this way, not because the Kuwaiti pier was degraded or unusable, but because they wanted to use as little of Kuwait's infrastructure as possible.

"Ninety percent of Kuwait's commodities are imported," Nelson said. "So we wanted to leave their piers alone if we could."

The other reason the group opted to create its own workspace, Wichterman said, was that the troops on the front lines needed bullets fast. More bullets can be taken off more ships when they aren't waiting for pier space.

"What we do and what we did determines what happens where the bullets are flying," Clutter said. "If we can't get the bullets to the boys on the front lines fast, then they'll be in a world of hurtin'."

Lt. Col. Preston Thompson, commander of the 24th Transportation Battalion, said there was no difference, other than the heat, in what the soldiers did during the training exercise Tuesday and what they did in Kuwait last year.

"It's a wartime mission," Thompson said. "We train to get it right because it's important. We're ready. We've been back from the Middle East for 10 months now and we'll have to do this again for real. It's not a question of if we'll go back over there to do this. It's when." *